Inbox placement
Where a message actually lands, decided per recipient — there is no single inbox rate for a campaign.
Say it out loud
“Where it lands is decided person by person, not campaign by campaign. There is no one inbox rate for a send.”
Placement is the outcome of the reputation question, and it resolves against each recipient's own history with you, at their own provider. The same campaign, in the same second, reaches one person's inbox and another's spam folder. That is why a single number for a send is a fiction, however confidently a tool reports one.
Same message, same authentication, same second. The difference is the person's history, not the send.
"Our inbox rate was 94%"
That is a sentence about a seed panel of addresses with no history, no purchases and no reason to want your mail. It is not a sentence about your recipients.
Nobody's
Nothing to action — it changes a number or a risk you report.
What goes wrong
Treating “delivered” in your platform as “landed in the inbox”. Delivered means the receiving server accepted the message. The spam folder is a successful delivery, and every platform reports it as one.
Not the same as
- Delivery rate
- Delivery is whether the server accepted it. Placement is which folder it went to afterwards, and no platform can see that for you.
See also
Where this sits
Stop 5, reputation decides. Having proved who you are, you find out whether they want you — and that is mostly about your history, not this message.